Good news: We just released the 4th major update for Bus Simulator 18 today. The update focuses on a number of additional performance optimizations as well as some general game improvements and bug fixes. More detailed information can be found in our changelog:

Changelog – Update #4

Optimizations:

• Tweak level of detail and shadow settings on various assets throughout the level to improve performance.
• NPC car level of detail and rendering settings have been tweaked for higher performance.
• The calculation of the NPC car orientation and position on the road is now done in parallel for all cars.
• Some PhysX queries are now done in an asynchronous manner, so the game logic needn't wait for them to finish.
• The route finding of our NPC cars and NPC buses is now done in an asynchronous manner in order to reduce micro stutter.
• Ring menu description texts are now placed inside a floating label in order to improve readability.
• Some ring menu buttons were re-arranged to improve usability.
• The animations of the bus cockpit have been optimized to use less CPU time.
• A performance bug in the code that updates audio effects when the player boards or dismounts the bus has been fixed.
• The data needed by passengers to find their way through the bus is now stored in a more efficient way, that does no longer require CPU time whenever the bus moves.
• NPC cars do not longer own a radio if they do not intend to use it. (Internal optimization to save performance).
• If the lights of a NPC car are turned off, it doesn’t carry the bloom effects for it around anymore.
• Functions that get called every frame on passengers and pedestrians are now fully implemented in C++. Previously they still had small parts implemented in the slower Blueprint scripting language.
• NPC cars no longer have any Blueprint code. They were fully ported to C++ for performance reasons.
• The handling of inputs axes, head tracking and mouse steering has been ported from Blueprint to C++ to improve performance.
• Car and bus animations have been made thread-safe by enabling multithreaded animation updates for them.
• The calculation of force feedback strength has been optimized.
• Change how some data is transferred in multiplayer. This should make the connection more tolerant to lags.
• Oncoming traffic now reacts a bit smarter when the player uses the indicators.
• Improved driver character steering wheel grabbing and improved performance of this code.
• The minimap in the bus and in the user interface are now displaying the same image, instead of rendering nearly the same thing twice. (Optimization to save performance).
• An icon for stop requests has been added to the UI minimap. It replaces the redundant icon for bus kneeling.
• Some parts of the minimap UI have been ported from Blueprint to C++ to improve performance.
• Loading times for several of the sub-levels of the default map have been improved in order to reduce stutters during level streaming.

Fixes:

• Fixed that windscreen wipers sometimes drifted slowly away from the bus.
• Fixed that the camera could clip into cars.
• Fixed that passengers trying to find their way to enter the bus would sometimes walk right through the bus.
• Fixed weird looking passenger movement while boarding the rear part of the bendy bus if the bus was bent.
• Fixed that the tutorial would continue after the player sold the wrong ticket to the passenger.
• Improved driver model positioning in Citaro K.
• Fixed that passengers spawned, but not picked up during the tutorial were waiting forever for their bus.
• Fixed that passengers would walk quite a distance if there was something blocking all shorter ways to the bus.
• Fixed several smaller localization issues.
• Fixed several “crash on exit” issues.
• Fixed that one of the truck models in game had mirrored indicator lights when viewed from far away.
• Fixed a crash bug when accepting a Steam multiplayer invite from the BS18 main menu.
• Fixed a crash related to faulty savegame files.
• Fixed that a bus driving on rail tracks could get traffic priority over cars at the railway crossing.
• Fixed that the player sometimes was unable to exit the ticket machine UI using a controller.
• Fixed a crash bug in host transfer, that triggered sometimes if a player bus happened to be on a crossroads during the disconnect.
• It should now be possible to stop the bus at all stations, without it sliding slowly downhill.

Modding:

• A new wheel handler for buses and bendy bus rear parts has been added that yields better performance. In order to get it to work, the animation blueprint needs to have the correct base class. See the updated example buses for details.
• Passenger move trees and passenger move nodes are no longer needed at runtime. It's now possible to set all passenger move trees and passenger move nodes on the bus blueprint to "Editor Only Component".

Important note for mod creators: Please note that we uploaded a new version of our Bus Simulator 18: Modding Kit. The updated version enables you to use some of the new performance optimizations for your mods too. More detailed information can be found in our Modding Kit Documentation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/145HmPFdIWdLTnIr6GHrecBjGIC84jRUgQLQUMtY9J4Q/